ABSTRACT
Teachers hold a variety of beliefs about learning, curriculum, pedagogy, and student assessment (Alderman, 2004; Calderhead, 1996; Woolfolk-Hoy, Davis, & Pape, 2006), including goal orientations (Kucsera, Roberts, Walls, Walker, & Svinicki, 2011), beliefs about classroom testing (Leighton, Gokiert, Cor, & Heffernan, 2010), cultural diversity (de Wet & Gubbins, 2011), subject matter (Gregoire, 2003), students motivation (Peterson, Schreiber, & Moss, 2011), differences in teaching practice (Rose & Lim, 2011), classroom management (Gibbs & Powell, 2012), teaching efficacy and ability to impact students (Goddard, Hoy, & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2000; Labone, 2004; Tschannen-Moran & Woolfolk-Hoy, 2001), epistemological beliefs (Hofer, 2004; Maggioni & Parkinson, 2008) and congruence among beliefs (Ye & Levin, 2008). It is important to understand teachers’ beliefs and their development in order to promote better teacher preparation and inservice development, as well as to understand the potential discrepancy between stated versus observed beliefs (Speer, 2005; Wilcox-Herzog, 2002). Because teachers’ beliefs may be related to student achievement, it also is important to understand them in order to promote student motivation and achievement (Alderman, 2004; Woolfolk-Hoy et al., 2006).
